“We can help birds simply by not hurting them and leaving them as free as possible to live out their joyous lives; but we can do much more if we will leave some little bushy nooks about the farm or garden, where they may nest in private, place food in convenient places during the long, cold winter months for those birds that remain with us, and _make it a rule never to raise more kittens than we need_ to keep barn and house free of rats or than we can feed and care for. “Silly people, who shirk responsibility, often say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t think of drowning a kitten,’ and yet they will let dozens of them grow up unfed and uncared for, or leave a litter by the roadside, until in many places a breed of gaunt, half-wild cats roam about destroying the eggs and young of song-birds, game-birds, and domestic fowls alike. “A nice, comfortable house or barn cat is one thing, but the savage outcast is quite another, and should no more be let live than a weasel or a skunk. HOUSING AND FEEDING “When places become thickly settled, and villages grow into towns and towns into cities, one of the first things that troubles the father and mother of a family is to find house-room, a suitable place to live, that shall be healthful for the children, and yet not be too far from the father’s work, and many and many a family have had to move to inconvenient places because such a home could not be found near by. “Strange as it may at first seem, our little fellow-citizens, the birds, have this same trouble. “In an open, half-wooded farming country there are plenty of nesting haunts, and running brooks and ponds for the birds who need water by their homestead. But presently perhaps a railway comes by; the land is bought up and the woods cut down for railway ties, the brush is cleared from old pastures and they are turned into house-lots. Old orchards, like ours here, are done away with, and everything is ‘cleaned up.’ “This is as it should be, and a sign of progress; but where are the birds that Nature has told to nest in tree hollows, like the Bluebird, Chickadee, the Tree Swallow, Downy and Hairy Woodpecker, and the jolly Yellowhammer, to find homes? “You will often hear people say, ‘It is too bad the Bluebirds are dying out;’ but if somewhere about the place you will fasten a hollow log or a square bird-box with a single round opening in it to a high fence-post or to a pole set up on purpose, you will soon see that the Bluebirds have not died out, but that they have been discouraged in their house-hunting. “It is a mistake to make bird-houses too large, or to have many rooms in them, unless you are hoping to attract Purple Martins, who like to live in colonies. Birds like a whole building to themselves quite as well as people, and they do not like people to come too close and peep in at their windows and doors, either.